


On a Northbound Train

by AStudyInAlgedonics



Series: Raccoon's Potterlock Verse [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Gift Fic, Johnlock sort of, M/M, Potterlock, Winterlock Fic Exchange, not yet because they're eleven and that's really weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-30
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-10 14:04:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1160556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AStudyInAlgedonics/pseuds/AStudyInAlgedonics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For destinationtoast, for the Winterlock fic exchange.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On a Northbound Train

**Author's Note:**

  * For [destinationtoast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/gifts).



> For destinationtoast, my recipient for the Winterlock gift exchange event! Apologies it took so long to get up, I had a bit of blockage caused by extreme S3 feelings and also coming back to college after break didn't help. Your prompt mentioned AUs in which John and Sherlock meet at a different point in their lives, and while researching you - I mean, browsing your blog, I found Potterlock to be among your reblogs. Since Potterlock is an alarmingly persistent plot bunny of mine (it plagues my 221Bs like...well, plague), Potterlock happened. 
> 
> Includes Watson and Holmes siblings mentions, some angst, conceited arsery on Sherlock's part, and my headcanon wand for John. Would have included UST, but they're eleven so that's kind of really squicky. 
> 
> I own absolutely nothing as ever and I hope you enjoy!

It starts, as one might expect, on a train headed north.

Growing up half-Muggle in Godric’s Hollow isn’t an easy task, especially after his mother (the magical one of his parents) develops a case of dragon pox that the village healers can’t touch. She refuses to go to St Mungo’s; says it’s only a touch of the sickness, won’t hurt her, she just needs time. When John’s father tries to drag her out of bed she jinxes him with a Stinging Hex; that’s the end of that idea right there. No one likes to be on the wrong side of a champion duellist at Hogwarts, even if years, illness, and motherhood have dulled her natural love of the fight. They certainly haven’t dulled her reflexes.

She says it’s going to be all right up until the day she dies, not long after the fateful Halloween that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named killed the Potters. John liked the Potters; Mrs Lily smiled at him from the window every time he passed by, on his way to meet Mike somewhere to play “Quidditch” (not really, but they do have a Quaffle that they toss around, and a bat, so they take turns throwing rocks at each other to play at being Beaters). The grief and fear hang over the Hollow for months, despite the celebrations of the Dark Lord’s defeat - it’s a close-knit village, wizarding hamlets always are, and losses like this never come easily.

His father turns to drink, and Harry follows him down when she’s eleven and hasn’t gotten her letter yet. Nothing ever happened for her, not the way that things did for John. Once she was on a broom with them and fell enough to break her leg; John was so scared of explaining to their father they’d been up too high that it felt like his stomach was twisting itself in knots and then her leg was just…fine, no longer bent wrong or making her swallow back angry tears of pain.

That was probably when Harry started to hate him, which is bitter medicine to swallow - hadn’t it been her leg he fixed, her he’d spared weeks of punishment for what was, in retrospect, a very little mistake? But John is apparently magical, so he gets his letter and he hides it from Harry and goes with Mike’s family to buy supplies for the year in Diagon Alley. Mike is a year older and has an owl; John can’t afford a pet. He can barely afford his wand, but at least it’s the last thing he needs to buy before he no longer has to think about it for another year.

The old man Ollivander is a bit terrifying, with his pale searching eyes and his curious manner of speaking. John’s almost afraid that he’ll be thrown out from the first mismatched wand, which makes all the quills in the cup on the desk catch fire simultaneously, but Ollivander just tsks and shakes his head before extinguishing them.

“Definitely not that one,” he says. “Here, try this…”

Eventually he finds one - “cedar wood and unicorn hair, twelve inches, slightly flexible,” says Ollivander - that makes warmth curl around his wrist as it lets off a little puff of Earl Grey-scented steam. The smell coaxes a smile onto his face. It’s comforting, reminds him of Mum and the way she always smelt of it no matter how long it had been since she’d drunk any.

“An interesting wand,” Ollivander says mildly as he scratches something down on a piece of parchment; he doesn’t elaborate, though, and John pays it no mind as he leaves the shop to protest Mike’s having bought him Fortescue ice cream.

Later, he will regret that he didn’t fix it in his mind, because it would have spared him a great deal of stress in fifth year to know that the channel for his magic does in fact favour both the seemingly-paradoxical things he wants to do most.

Mike’s mother takes them home and John tucks the wand away, safe and snug in its box, where Harry won’t break it out of spite, against the coming of September first. 

* * *

The Stamfords take him along to King’s Cross too, and help him through the barrier to Platform 9 3/4. Not that it really requires help, exactly; John just has a lot of trouble managing to throw himself bodily against a solid brick wall. All his instincts are shouting at him that it’s definitely real, and it’s definitely going to hurt if he smashes himself into it.

Except it doesn’t, of course; it sort of flickers around him and makes his eyes ache as he strains to peer out the corners at the wall before he gets through onto the platform. Around him, other kids are bustling, bickering with family, saying tearful or deeply indifferent or cheerful goodbyes. Owls are hooting loudly and he nearly trips over a cat someone’s letting wander loose. At least he’s not stepping on any toes or toads. There are so many people running around, in all kinds of colourful robes aside from the few Muggle-garbed students, that John’s starting to get a headache from the chattering stimulation. Diagon Alley was crowded too, but at least it had slightly more space to spread out; here there’s clots of people crammed together. For a moment John longs fiercely for the relative calm of the Hollow.

The hours until eleven flow by quickly and slowly at once; John and Mike pass the time by chatting with some of the other kids they know from the village. Everyone is nervous, excited, anxious, apprehensive, stressing over their future Houses. John has never worried much about it before - so long as he isn’t in Slytherin, he could understand any of the other Houses but Slytherin makes no sense to him - but he finds himself sympathising with them. Everyone wants to be in Gryffindor. And why not? They were raised in the village Godric Gryffindor himself called home, after all.

Finally ten-thirty comes and everyone starts crowding onto the train, pressing in so they can get settled before departure time. In the scramble John accidentally loses sight of Mike; despite increasingly-frantic calls he can’t catch up with the other boy. He’s alone in the middle of the Hogwarts Express and suddenly he feels as though he doesn’t belong here. He grew up practically Muggle; even visiting the Stamfords as often as he did he’s only gotten peeks into the wizarding world. It all still feels so foreign, as though there’s a pane of glass between him and the other students in the rapidly-emptying aisle - at least the Muggleborns don’t feel like they’re disconnected, wrong, broken because they’re expected to know things they can’t possibly know.

For a moment, John feels like he’s floating off the world, and, in fact, stumbles and falls to his feet. At least he didn’t actually start levitating; losing control would be embarrassing at eleven years of age on the way to Hogwarts itself. No, the train has just jolted underneath him, that’s all. Quickly he throws himself into the nearest compartment; it looks empty and maybe Mike will come walking along to find him if he waits long enough. At least then he won’t be alone anymore; he’ll have someone to talk to.

“What are you doing in here?” The sharp demand makes him jump up slightly, wondering if there’s somehow a ghost in the train. Shouldn’t it be colder if there is? He notices the boy sitting on the floor now that he’s snapped out of wallowing immediately and feels a bit sheepish about missing him - but not about being in the compartment. He has just as much right to be here as a brat who can’t even use a seat properly.

“Sitting,” John retorts. “Where I’m supposed to. Why’re you on the floor?”

The boy gives a dramatic huff. “Avoiding my brother. I can see you know how that is; he’s not magical, though, is he?”

It’s startling in its veracity; Harry exists mostly as a bane to John’s existence, of course. He can’t possibly know that, though.

“No,” John says, staring at the boy: pale, skinny, and currently scrubbing his fingers through his mop of matted curly dark hair. Nothing to really suggest any supernatural, super-magical powers besides how anyone can be that thin and maintain that thick hair.

He doesn’t mean to ask. It could have been a lucky guess, trying to intimidate John into leaving. He shouldn’t even have admitted it were true. “How did you know?” he blurts after approximately thirty seconds.

* * *

In five minutes, John has learned that the boy’s name is Sherlock; that he figured out John’s sibling existed from the spatters of paint on John’s trainers - actually from Harry’s painter phase, when she often chased him away by flinging handfuls of paint at him and threatening to sell him as modern art to a museum - because “you’re clearly not artistic yourself, or you’d have more current traces on you”; and that everyone in the whole world is an idiot because Harry is actually a girl. All this is pattered out amidst much abuse directed at the older brother - Mycroft apparently, and Sherlock; honestly, John can practically smell the pureblood on those names, good grief - for not consenting to let Sherlock attend Durmstrang instead of Hogwarts.

“It would have been much more interesting,” Sherlock explains. John is giving him a sidelong look, because as spotty as his magical knowledge is, he does know Durmstrang’s a bit of a dodgy school. “I could have learnt Dark methods from the inside - that’d give me an advantage.”

“What kind of advantage?” What sort of advantage with Dark magic could anyone possibly want? They’re both too young to properly remember the dark years of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, but John is very familiar with the ruin left of the Potters’ house and can’t imagine the sort of cruelty that would seek out that power.

“Familiarity.” It’s obvious that impatience is Sherlock’s default tone. “So I know everything about them and can catch them.”

There’s really no reason to be relieved; Sherlock is a stranger, John’s not particularly invested in what he wants to do. Still, he is very relieved by that. “You want to be an Auror?”

Sherlock snorts. “Hardly. I’m much too clever to be an Auror.” The confusion in John’s head must show on his face because Sherlock rolls his eyes and elaborates. “The Aurors are stupid and the Dark wizards are stupid. If I track down the Dark wizards before any of the official Aurors can, I can prove they’re lacking, you see?”

This is probably the most arrogant person John has ever met. He’s about to say as much when he realises that actually could be - amazing. Someone with wit like Sherlock’s who can figure out people’s lives just from seeing them…that could be really, really good. He could probably spot a liar by looking at their hands or something.

“Cool,” he says, rather awe-struck. Sherlock blinks at him for a moment and John wonders if he’s actually taken the vain boy by surprise.

“That’s unusual,” Sherlock says at last. “Normally people say…well, Mycroft and Father,” he corrects himself, “say ‘arrogant brat’.”

John grins at him, and Sherlock smiles back; and it’s a bit mad but John thinks he quite likes him - strange as the boy is. 


End file.
